


The White Piano

by LSDAndKizuki



Category: The Beatles
Genre: Character Study, Gen, I wrote it for a philosophy challenge, References to Drugs, Songwriting, kinda philosophical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 08:58:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10214042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LSDAndKizuki/pseuds/LSDAndKizuki
Summary: The time was calling for it, so he wrote it. The genesis of a song that changed the world, and one man's legacy.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm kind of sad that this is the first Beatle-related story that's going up here because there is... no mclennon... sorry.. I wrote it for a philosophy challenge, hence the complete lack of proper nouns. There are people at school who have had ENOUGH of me giving them essays about John Lennon.   
> Anyway, I hope it's still interesting enough, despite the lack of Paul. I do intend to write a mclennon in the future, I just don't know when. Some day.

The time was calling for it. The Americans in Vietnam were on their last legs, the people’s will was answered, and there was still a generation of young eager faces, waiting to be told their way in life. They would not listen to the world leaders, or their schoolteachers, or the press; they would, he decided sombrely, listen to him.

And so he gave them something to listen to, because the time was calling – no, _gasping_ for it. It was a song that had already existed, before he wrote it down. He simply pulled it fully formed out of the ether, stuck his name and face on it, and played it for the world’s ear on a white grand piano. His darling wife, the love of his life was very supportive of the whole affair, and frequently said so. “It is such an _important_ song,” she assured him. “And the melody is just everlasting. They will sing this song after your death.”

“ _Our_ death.” Because they were one, and one could not continue without its other half. With the state he was in creeping through his body, and with her firm figure blurred through misted glasses, he smiled and agreed with her: they were, the two halves that they were, doing great things.

These were the thoughts he had when he was helpless and high, and far enough gone to believe his own sanctimonious bullshit.

“It’s only a bloody song,” he would growl at his former roadie, when his own words were snidely parroted back at him. _Do as I say, not as I do,_ he’d want to add, but that was pig-headed even for him. To the press, he’d quip that the whole thing was the communist manifesto put to piano music, in the hope of lightening the message a little. Every day he returned to his stretching apartment, full of plumped pillows, high-tech appliances and fashionable clothes – all that same sterile white, that pure and honest colour-that-was-all colours. People tended to blink their eyes rapidly on entering his abode, both at the bleached brightness effect, and at the sight of such luxurious living.  

When he was high, those pseudo-cosmopolitan lyrics seemed to make sense. The song was, after all, one of dreams, and in a dream, he knew in his heart that he believed it: the world _should_ be one, we _should_ all forget our differences and live for each other, and then there truly _would_ be peace on earth. In his real waking hours, he thought the same, only he added silently, _yes, but what has that got to do with me?_ “A hit song, that’s all it was,” he whispered to his sweet and transcendental wife, “Just piles and piles of money and fame for me. Nothing good whatever.” She kissed his forehead, and as usual said exactly the right thing: “That doesn’t matter. You are more than it.” And again, he believed her.

He died, and his final bloodstained thoughts were fearful prayers to a long-denounced God that there _was_ a heaven for him after all. If there was one, no one there asked him how he felt about what happened next.  While his ashes became one with the earth, the trifle of a song became his own ghost, trailing after his name and face, bad hipster poetry without the steady piano notes beneath. The words were emblazoned on the sky and his legacy. The time had called out for them, but they outlived that time and him, sunken like millstones into the mind of the world. And with those hollow words as its guide, the mind kept hope, and imagined, imagined, imagined.


End file.
